1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to technology for recognizing characters printed in magnetic ink on the surface of a check.
2. Description of the Related Art
Check processing devices that have a magnetic ink character reader (MICR) for reading magnetic information denoting characters printed with magnetic ink on the surface of a check, and for recognizing the magnetic ink characters from this magnetic information are now common. Some check processing devices also use an optical character reader (OCR) to improve character recognition accuracy by additionally optically reading and recognizing the characters. These check-processing devices combine the magnetic data recognition result and the optical data recognition result to improve the reliability of the character recognition process. See, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application 2000-344428.
However, combining the magnetic data recognition result and optical data recognition result does not improve character recognition reliability under certain circumstances. If, for example, reliability is improved by comparing the magnetic data recognition result and optical data recognition result character by character, a mismatch will be confirmed between substantially all of the characters if a shift of just a single character column occurs between the optical and magnetic data recognition results.